Best Practices for Preventing Emails from Going into the Spam Folder in Gmail

1. Make Sure that the Messages are Authenticated

•  Authenticated messages protect the recipients from malicious and phishing emails, making it less likely that they will be identified as spam by Gmail.
•  Authentication methods that can be used include:
• Publishing an "SPF record" for the domain. This prevents the sending of unauthorized emails that seem to come from your domain.
• Turning on "DKIM signing" for the messages that are sent. This is a very simple process that only requires that the recipients verify that the message was actually sent by the domain owner.
• Publishing a DMARC record for the domain, protecting the domain from email spoofing.
• Domain authentication helps to legitimize domains sending bulk messages, allowing them to pass through spam filters. Services such as MailerLite help with domain authentication.

2. Use of a Trusted IP Address to Send Emails

• It is important to choose a dedicated IP address to send all the emails. A dedicated IP address needs to be used by a single sender, meaning that no other companies or marketers can send emails from it.
• Sending emails from different IP addresses banishes the domain's reputation, making the emails land in spam folders.
• When sending emails from a new IP address, it is important to build a reputation score by sending a few emails at once. This can be done by dividing the mailing list into groups with different recipients, sending the emails on different days or weeks.
• On the other hand, using a shared IP address means that multiple mail senders rely on it. The activity of all the senders affects the reputation of everyone relying on the IP.
• If a shared IP is the only option for sending emails, the sender should ensure that the IP address is not on a blocklist. Messages sent from a blocklist IP are likely to be marked as spam.
•  Postmaster Tools can be used to check the reputation of a shared IP address.